Dear NDSA members, 

This year's iPres conference (http://ipres2015.web.unc.edu/) will feature many NDSA related topics. Highlighted below are sessions lead by NDSA members and leaders. Earlybird registration for iPres ends October 1. Hope to see you there! -Abbey

Tuesday, November 3
1:00 - 2:30 pm
Panel: Advancing the Evidence Base of Digital Preservation. Micah Altman, Helen Tibbo and NDSA Coordinating Committee
Research is critical to the advancement of both basic understanding and the effective practice of digital preservation.  But research must be effectively linked to practice in order to improve outcomes. This panel focuses on discussions of methodology, metrics, tools, and exemplars that can effectively build the evidence base for digital preservation. Panelists will address the following questions:

What exemplars have been most successful  systematically contribute to the overall cumulative evidence base for digital preservation practice and resulting?
How can replicable, scaleable research and assessment methods -- including trend analysis, simulation, and designed experiments be best integrated into preservation practices? 
What approaches are successful in integrating research and practice (research-based-practice or practice-based-research)?
What are the strengths and weakness of current metrics and measurements for digital preservation practice? 

3:00 - 4:30 pm
Panel: Preserving Born-Digital News. Edward McCain, Hannah Sommers, Christie Moffatt, Abigail Potter, Martin Klein and Stéphane Reecht
The news industry has quickly adopted networked digital technologies to create and distribute their content across all media types and in an ever-increasing number of formats. These technologies have also enabled individuals to capture and share information, news, and opinion on contemporary and community events. These changes contribute to a dynamic news ecosystem, upending traditional publishing models that both media companies and libraries have depended on to save the news. In this panel, the challenges and opportunities of preserving born-digital news content will be presented and discussed. A preliminary environmental scan of the state of digital news preservation will be shared. Perspectives and tactics from the “front-line” of news creation will be covered in addition to establishing special collections to capture and preserve web sites that cover news events. Efforts to establish relationships with the creators of content management systems (CMS) that drive the back end of modern media publishing networks will also be presented, as will tools that have been developed to capture social media and other content from the web that contributes to the present day news ecosystem.  

5:00 - 7:00 pm NDSA Leadership Meeting (for elected CC members and WG co-chairs)
Agenda tbd


Wednesday, November 4
10:30 - 12:00 pm
Panel: Engaging Content Creators to Improve the Capture and Preservation of Born-Digital Content. 
The 2015 National Agenda for Digital Stewardship calls for stewardship organizations to engage content creators to improve the capture and preservation of born-digital content. This panel will provide an overview of three different efforts to reach out to different communities who create content that stewardship organizations want to acquire and preserve. The Dance Heritage Coalition will present outcomes from their Knight funded project to work directly with dance companies and critics to capture born-digital content documenting dance and dance performance. Efforts of the U.S. Federal Web Archiving Working Group to interact with federal webmasters to improve the capture and preservability of federal information and government web sites will also be covered. Finally, building relationships with community news media and developing donor agreements for the transfer of assets will be discussed. Other born-digital content areas could also be covered.

3:00 - 5:00 pm
Poster session: In the Thicket of It with the NDSA Standards and Practices Working Group: Cultivating Grass Roots Approaches to Real-World Digital Preservation Issues. Winston Atkins, Erin Engle, Andrea Goethals, Karl J. Jackson, Carol Kussmann, Kate Murray, Michelle Paolillo, Mariella Soprano 
One of five National Digital Stewardship Alliance (NDSA) working groups, Standards and Practices Working Group projects and discussions originate from real-world issues that members face in their daily work. Since 2010, the S&P has sought to identify community knowledge gaps for the “on-the-ground practitioners” across a broad spectrum of content areas and to work collaboratively to bridge those gaps. Some of the topics recently addressed by the S&P include preservation of digital artworks, issues related to optical media, stumbling blocks for preserving video collections and analyzing risks and benefits of the PDF/A3 format for archival institutions among many others. Using the visual imagery of a fruit tree, this poster explores the grass-roots nature of S&P projects and products, from the foundational member institutions comprising the soil and roots, through the trunk and branches of the tree addressing different topics, and finally reaching to the individual leaves and fruit representing project outcomes and deliverables, as well as work still to do. The goal of the poster is to highlight the self-organizing nature of the S&P’s varied projects as well as to increase community awareness of the collaboratively developed resources and products.

5:00 - 7:00 pm
NDSA Reception: 
NDSA Innovation Award Ceremony
The NDSA will be awarding their Innovation Awards during the iPres reception on Wednesday night. 


Friday, November 6
1:00 - 5:00 pm 
Workshop: Data Mining Web Archives. Jefferson Bailey